Jeffrey Yang Leads Us into the Abyss

“I used to keep a list of books in which ‘the abyss’ appeared — the physical-metaphorical-metaphysical-condition-of-the-bottomless-existence-of-our-darkest-nightmares-realized abyss,” begins Jeffrey Yang in his essay “Translating the Abyss” in our March issue. His catalog grew so long that he stopped keeping a physical list. This made us curious: how many references to the gaping void have appeared in Poetry’s pages? Quite a few, in fact. It’s an international phenomenon:

Pascal’s abyss went with him at his side,
closer than blood—alas, activity,
dreams, words, desire: all holes! On every side,
spaces, the bat-wing of insanity!
Above, below me, only depths and shoal,
the silence!

Surrounded
by the earth’s green froth
—these lettuces,
bunches of carrots—
only you
lived through
the sea’s truth, survived
the unknown, the
unfathomable
darkness, the depths
of the sea,
the great
abyss,
le grand abîme,
only you:
varnished
black-pitched
witness
to that deepest night.

When the last Pullman of the day pulls into the Grand Canyon station,
And in the sunset light the passengers come
One after another over the platform, over the sward to the rim
Line up, look down,
The shadows loom
Fast into pools bluer than morning,
Abyss drawn by its river miles from home,
And they look into it as into a family-album,
Where every eccentricity has room.